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GIVE "FREAKS" A CHANCE!

Barely more
than a month before, the National Broadcasting Co., a
wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, had
canceled Freaks and Geeks, a TV series of
significant critical acclaim and persistently low
ratings, in the middle of its first season. If no more
than 6 or 7 million viewers tuned in on an average
night -- small change in network accounting, but, hey,
6 or 7 million viewers -- they were unusually
avid, and all the more so for how difficult it was to
determine whether the show, which concerned two groups
of socially marginal Midwestern teenagers surviving
high school at the dawn of the '80s, would be on from
one week to the next. Under the name Operation
Haverchuck -- named for Bill Haverchuck, the series'
geekiest, and noblest, geek -- fans had banded
together online and raised $3,746 to buy the Variety
page in hopes of influencing another network to adopt
the show.

The cancellation lit up Internet message
boards. Dismayed loyal viewers, mostly in their late
20s and their 30s, but into their 60s as well, called
it "clever and wonderful," praised its "clarity,
accuracy, and honesty" and how it was nice to "for
once, see a show about high school that wasn't a soap
opera or centered entirely around sex." Now it was
gone, and they were pissed off . . . angry
and disappointed . . . positively
distraught. NBC was the No Brains Channel,
Nothing But Crap, and its executives were "maroons,"
"morons," "empty suits," "@#$! idiots" who "wouldn't
know a good show if it smacked them in the face," "if
it bit them on their number crunching asses." "Do you
have blind chimps making your programming decisions?"
one writer asked. "Are you guys high? No more NBC ever
again for me after the last episode airs. And I belong
to a Nielsen family, so there." Wise to the bottom
line, fans offered themselves on an altar of
consumerism to any other network willing to pick up
the series: "I'm a thirtysomething mom in a
six-figure-income household. I am your advertisers'
dream consumer." "I am over 35 and I buy stuff. I
represent a demographic which could and should be
exploited and I encourage you to do so." Schooled by Entertainment
Tonight, Entertainment Weekly and TV
Guide in the arcana of the business of show,
they knew what had gone wrong: Freaks and Geeks
needed "a reasonable, permanent time slot,"
"meaningful promotion, and a little patience from
network execs." "Lucky will be the network that picks
this up and with that decision will come legions of
intelligent viewers who like substance and talent in
their shows," wrote a woman named Virginia. "NOT TO
MENTION I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT BILL."

Well,
I'm right there with you, Virginia. TV's
like that: Because while the
audience for a movie or a play understands going in
that the story ends in two hours and everyone goes
home afterward, the characters on a television series
have an open-ended existence and, while they live,
they live in infinite real time, they might go on for
years, growing older right along with you, like your
family, like your neighbors, like yourself. They are
family: Your TV Family.

"The reason Cheers was so
popular," observes Freaks and Geeks creator
and co-executive producer Paul Feig, citing a series
that survived a famously slow start to run for a
decade, "was not because people love shows about bars,
but because that group of people over the years became
your friends. When Seinfeld was on" -- another
legendary slow starter -- "it was always, like, 'Did
you hear what George said last night?' That's the
problem with TV now making it so that things have to
hit after a few weeks, because it means you have to
make friends immediately -- which is why the
network wants actors to be beautiful, because you
become infatuated with them, and you'll watch week
after week because they're beautiful and they're your
surrogate boyfriend/girlfriend."

The whole point of Freaks and Geeks,
which came onto television in the season of Popular,
Roswell, and the continuing rosy, youthful glow
of Dawson's Creek and Felicity and Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, was to repudiate that sort
of glossy wish fulfillment and represent the real: a
show about kids who looked like and acted like kids,
rather than impossibly well-spoken runway models. "I
feel like most high school shows are written by guys
who go, 'If I knew then what I know now, I would rule,'"
says Feig. "Which is bullshit. You'd just get your ass
kicked worse. You'd be one-upping the bully with a
clever quip, and -- bam!" Jake Kasdan, who
directed the pilot and four other episodes, and helped
establish the look and feel of the show, developed an
aesthetic of "uncosmetic decisions." "The close-ups
are looser than you'd expect -- there's a little too
much space, and the kids are kind of awkward in the
frame -- and we used a very cool palette as opposed to
most network dramas, which are very warm, and
everyone's incredibly pretty and healthy-looking, so
that everyone's cheeks are this vibrant red. Where on
Freaks and Geeks everyone's face is sort of
like . . . light blue." The producers encouraged
improvisation and input from their young players, who
were cast, says Paul, "with no criteria other than
that we want the most talented, funny, good kids in
the world. You see a lot of precocious kids who have
been coached by their parents and have all these
strange adult mannerisms, but when the kid walks in
who is confident enough to just be himself or herself,
you immediately go, That's the kid." Some had
never acted professionally before, some had never
acted at all. In many cases, the creators worked
backward, inventing characters to suit the actors they
found; by the time the cameras rolled, the pilot had
been two-thirds rewritten.

Set in a leafy suburb of Detroit in the
1980-81 school year, the series centered on
16-year-old Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) and her
14-year-old brother, Sam (John Francis Daley), and
their attempts to navigate the shoals and shallows,
and sometimes sharks, of most anybody's adolescence.
"Lindsay is trying very, very hard to grow up,"
executive producer Judd Apatow has said, "and Sam is
trying very, very hard to stay a child," which is
about as much of a "situation" as the show ever had.
Sidelined by an existential crisis upon the death of
her grandmother, honor student Lindsay (the only TV
heroine I have ever heard say she doesn't believe in
God -- you go, girl) abandons overachievement
to hang with slow-track "freaks" Daniel (James
Franco), Nick (Jason Segel), Ken (Seth Rogen) and Kim
(Busy Philipps); Sam, whose character bore the burden
of reliving Paul Feig's peerlessly clueless
adolescence, had his own best friends, Neal (Samm
Levine) and Bill (Martin Starr), hip-joined in the
twilight of childhood and endlessly speculating on
what comes next. Becky Ann Baker and SCTV's
Joe Flaherty played the senior Weirs. To meet them as
a viewer was like making any real-world acquaintance,
with first impressions continually revised and
complicated by subsequent encounters and deeper
knowledge.

The show flirted with type -- the tough
bad girl, the sexy bad boy, the stoner, the brain, the
doof, the cranky dad -- only to demolish type at every
opportunity. "You never quite knew where you were
going to go as a character," says Jason Segel, "but it
was always going to be interesting." Indeed, the
show's seasonal arc was less about developing a
narrative, less a matter of gathering force toward a
conclusion or cliffhanger, than of enlarging
understanding: The arc was inward, you might
say, and the series grew richer, and more serious,
with each episode -- though it was at the same time
extremely, if most often painfully, funny. ä

It's
late March, a week and a half after the cancellation call, and at the Freaks and
Geeks production office at Raleigh Studios in
Hollywood, the Who and Zeppelin posters are still on
the walls, desks are still covered with papers,
colored-marker story breakdowns remain unerased from
whiteboards, the copiers and printers are still
plugged in, and the kitchen has been stocked for at
least one more morning with candy bars and cookies,
bagels and cream cheese. The staff is due out of the
office by the end of April. "Hopefully they'll wash
the carpet before new people come in," says Maureen
Jennings, the producers' assistant and Web producer.

And yet, though the show is off the air
-- in the gentle terms of the television business, it
is on "indefinite hiatus" -- with six filmed episodes
languishing unseen, it is not yet exactly dead; its
spirit still hovers over the body on the
operating-room table. The locker-lined halls of
McKinley High have been taken from Raleigh Studios to
a downtown warehouse in what DreamWorks, which
produces the show, is for the moment calling "a fold
and hold" -- which is to say, not a "dead strike,"
which is to say that all hope has not been abandoned
that they may yet be of use. Cast members still drop
by the office, although often it's on the way to or
from an audition for another show. As the days pass,
Martin Starr will be cast in an as-yet-untitled Wayne
"Newman" Knight pilot, John Francis Daley in the new
Geena Davis sitcom, Samm Levine in a project from King
of the Hill's Greg Daniels. But everyone remains
in touch -- Starr and Seth Rogen are even going to
find an apartment together -- and Freaks and Geeks
holds an option on their services until June 15. It
isn't over until it's over.

Meanwhile, there are still two episodes
to finish, music to lay in, sound to mix. The final
five were all directed by either Paul, Judd or Jake.
Paul wrote and directed the season finale early and
out of sequence to be sure of closure in case of early
cancellation. Exactly who they are finishing them for
besides themselves and the gods isn't exactly clear at
this point, though several cable networks have
expressed interest in rerunning the completed season.
(MTV now seems the likely winner; the Museum of
Television and Radio in Beverly Hills is currently
staging a marathon showing of the season, which
culminates this weekend, May 13 -- which sold out in
15 minutes -- and 14, with the six unaired episodes.)
Their best hope is that whoever reruns them will do so
well that they'll order new episodes, though neither
Paul nor Judd would make a "cheaper" version of the
show, which cost about $1.5 million an episode to
produce. Their other best hope is that, once networks
set their fall slates and realize how crappy all their
pilots are, one will discover a hole in its schedule
that only Freaks and Geeks can fill. If
nothing else, they'll do what they did with "Kim Kelly
Is My Friend" -- an episode NBC thought was a little
too rough to run -- and send tapes of the unaired
shows, which they all agree are some of their best,
out into the "unofficial distribution system." Let
the bootlegging begin. On this particular
afternoon, Judd estimates the chances of new episodes
at 20 percent; a week later, he's revised it downward
to 8 percent.

Of course, the cancellation even of
excellent television series is news strictly of the
Dog Bites Man variety. And yet the short, bumpy life
of Freaks and Geeks seems to exemplify in a
particularly vivid and awful manner much that's gone
wrong with network TV, increasingly a place of
abbreviated faith, second-guess scheduling and summary
execution. The show was given a difficult initial time
slot (Saturdays at 8 p.m., sometimes called the "death
slot") and limited promotion; was repeatedly
pre-empted, for the World Series, the November Sweeps,
December just for good measure, and again for February
Sweeps (on for two weeks, off for three, on for three,
off for eight, on for five, off for four, on for two,
and bye-bye); and had the bad luck to have to compete
with Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, The
American Music Awards and the Mary and Rhoda
reunion. And then, when it quite understandably could
not find its audience -- nor an audience find it --
and in spite of the intensity of its critical support,
it was deep-sixed. (To a number of commentators its
future was always in doubt: "Now, in fact, might be a
good time to register www.save-f&g.com," Time
magazine suggested presciently two and a half weeks
before the show debuted.) It may have been the
season's best series, but there are no loss leaders in
commercial television, because in the adversarial
system the broadcast majors have locked themselves
into, every half-hour is a hill to take, and every
show is an island: The cast of Friends are not
about to take a pay cut to subsidize the production of
Freaks and Geeks, though you are of course free
to suggest it.

At the same time, this is not a typical
case at all. Because for all the bad decisions and bad
luck, and notwithstanding NBC programming guru Garth
Ancier's avowal that he would prefer the characters
lead "less depressing lives" and could score "one
decent-sized victory per episode" (their victory,
responded Apatow, was just to survive with their
decency and humor intact), from a creative standpoint
it was all just a dream. To say that Paul
wrote a script that Judd loved, which Judd took to
DreamWorks, where he has a deal to produce and write
for TV and films, and DreamWorks brought to NBC
(before Ancier moved over from the WB), where they
loved it as well and green-lit a pilot on the first
draft and a couple of months later okayed the
production of 13 episodes, is to barely oversimplify
what proved to be an unusually quick and painless
process. Except when the Columbine massacre made some
executives momentarily nervous over running a show
about high school misfits, there was never any
corporate drag on the engine, not a mote of network
interference, and Paul and Judd were allowed to make
exactly the show they wanted to make, with a team of
writers and a cast of players who by all accounts
loved and respected and were just absolutely blown
away by one another as much as anyone ever has been on
this green Earth. "I'm proud of every frame of it,"
says Apatow. They were able for a year to work as
artists, to make art, with millions and millions of
dollars of NBC's money, and how the hell many people
ever get to do that?

Like the
people they write about, Feig and Apatow and Kasdan (who wrote and directed the
strange and lovely Sherlock Holmes riff Zero
Effect a couple of years back, at the age of 22)
are in their work temperamentally creatures of the
fringe. Apatow's out-of-the-mainstream previous
credits include writing and executive-producing The
Ben Stiller Show, which was canceled by Fox
after only 12 episodes, and The Larry Sanders Show,
which, he says, wasn't even highly rated by the
standards of HBO; Feig was barnstorming college
campuses with his independent feature Life Sold
Separately when, coming within his old orbit, he
composed the Freaks and Geeks pilot in a
series of Midwestern motel rooms. The words that recur
most frequently when they speak of their aims for the
series are truth, honesty, reality.
Judd and Paul wanted their show to be funny not in the
efficient and often mechanical way that sitcoms are
funny, but in the messy way that life is funny. Which
is to say, they wanted to make it about all the dark,
awful stuff they lived themselves. When finishing a
show, says Kasdan, Judd and Paul would go through
takes "looking for facial tics and little errors to
include, and would actually recut the scene so that
they can be included in the scene." "Somebody trips or
drops something," says Paul, "it's guaranteed to be
in."

"Paul's whole thing is the comedy of
persecution and humiliation and misery," says Kasdan,
"and in fact those are almost completely universal
values. Nobody thinks of themselves as a popular
person -- even the people who were popular
don't tend to remember themselves that way. And the
great leap he made early on was that you ä could do a show
about people who consider themselves outcasts and it
would pertain to almost everyone."

After the pilot sold, the newly assembled
writing staff sat in a room and shared teenage war
stories; they brought out their old yearbooks and
answered questionnaires -- Who was your first
girlfriend? Who was the first girl you broke up
with? Were you ever caught doing drugs? "It was
like group therapy a lot of the time," says Paul.
"Within the first two days you knew everything about
every person on the staff. It was like, 'My god,
that's the worst story I've ever heard, and we have to
do it on the show.'" Paul took some pride in being the
guy with the most embarrassing stories: the
denim-jumpsuit incident, for example (as re-created in
the episode "Looks and Books"). He was picked on by
bullies because he was tall but wouldn't fight back,
was slaughtered in dodge ball, feared showering in
gym. He was afraid of girls and all they implied. A
reporter once asked him if his high school experience
had really been all that horrible. "I like to think it
was," he replied.

Paul and Judd have been friends since the
mid-'80s, when Paul, who had just left USC film
school, and Judd, who had just entered it, both found
themselves spending time at the Ranch, a "piece of
shit" house in the Valley that was a hangout for
standup comics, including Dave "Gruber" Allen, who
would later play Mr. Rosso, Freaks and Geeks'
not-quite-ex-hippie guidance counselor. Like Sam Weir
and his friends, for whom The Jerk and Caddyshack
represent the perfection of the cinematic arts,
both had been teenage comedy geeks. Paul, who grew up
in the Detroit suburb of Mount Clemens ("the biggest
small town in Michigan"), was at age 13 so into Steve
Martin that he bought a white suit and a microphone
"and every night would come home, put on my white
suit, put on the Let's Get Small album and
pantomime the entire thing into the microphone, for
like two years straight. I actually built the arrow,
learned how to play the banjo. It was very sad." At 15
he began doing his own material at a Detroit comedy
club that most nights operated as a biker bar; his
parents had to go along in order for him to get in.
After leaving USC, he worked for several years as a
standup, then moved into sitcoms (Sabrina the
Teenage Witch, The Jackie Thomas Show)
and small roles in films. (One, the surprisingly smart
Disney summer-camp film Heavyweights, was
executive-produced and co-written by Apatow.)

As a teenager on Long Island, Judd also
found himself through comedy. "You're writing and
directing, and you are the show, and nobody has any
power over you," he says. "Especially when you're a
lonely kid, it's a way to have a giant group of
strangers be nice to you -- though you have to go
through so much abuse to finally get to where you
learn how to get them to like you." He had a show on
his high school radio station for which he interviewed
dozens of professional comedians, including Jay Leno,
Jerry Seinfeld, John Candy and Garry Shandling (with
whom he'd later work on Larry Sanders, and on
whose It's Garry Shandling's Show Paul Feig
for one season had a recurring role). "That was an
incredible education, because they would tell me,
'It'll take you this many years to develop your
character, this is how you do open-mike nights, here's
how you write a joke.' So I had this game plan in my
head: I'm 17 -- if I do comedy for 10 years I'll hit
when I'm 27 -- and I came out here and tried to
execute the plan. What I didn't know was I wasn't that
good at it." And so he retired, though not
before sharing an HBO young-comedians special with Ray
Romano and Janeane Garofalo, and became a writer, and
then a producer. When he got his deal at DreamWorks,
he let Feig, whom he'd always thought of as "hilarious
and one of the good guys," know that he was looking
for material, and in October 1998 Paul sent him the
script he'd written in those Midwest motel rooms.

Shooting
on the series began in August of 1999; by mid-September the first reviews were
in, and they were all excellent. Time called Freaks
and Geeks "the best fall drama aimed at any
demographic," Rolling Stone thought it
"stunningly funny and moving" and Talk "a
minor vérité masterpiece." The September
25 premiere did well enough -- better demographically
than any NBC premiere had done in that spot since 1991
-- that the word hit was tentatively applied,
but the next week was not nearly so well attended, and
after that the clouds of doom never really dispersed.
In another context -- on the WB, say, or on HBO, the
show would have been, even on a bad week, accounted a
success -- The Sopranos' audience was not
significantly bigger -- but NBC's bottom line is
notched higher, and Freaks and Geeks had the
distinction of being its lowest-rated show. And yet
the signals from the network were always mixed. A time
change in January from Saturday night to Monday seemed
like a vote of confidence, and Apatow was able to get
NBC to okay more episodes at midseason. But they only
ordered four out of a possible "back nine," and that
didn't seem like confidence at all.

After four weeks off the air, Freaks
and Geeks was set for its third and final
"re-launch" on March 13. Apatow tried unsuccessfully
to shake loose some more promo time from the network,
which was more concerned with pushing midseason
replacements Daddio, Battery Park and
God, the Devil and Bob (the last two of which
have also since been canceled). On the Friday before,
Variety reported that NBC had renewed Third
Watch, The West Wing and Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit, each of which
averaged an audience about twice the size of Freaks
and Geeks'. (The network's other new hourlong
show, Cold Feet, had already been axed.) Paul
sent critics tapes of the finale, "Discos and Dragons"
-- not scheduled to air until the end of April --
because, as he prophetically wrote, "If you don't tell
people we exist, no one will see it but you."

That Saturday, the Museum of Television
and Radio, as part of its annual William S. Paley
Television Festival, devoted an evening to the show.
Except for James Franco, who was out promoting a
movie, all of the main cast were onstage at the
Directors Guild, along with Judd, Paul and Jake;
several supporting players were in the audience as
well. They screened "I'm With the Band," which Judd
had directed and in which Paul had a cameo, and the
makers met their audience, who showered them with love
and support and wanted to know what NBC's problem was.
"Judd and Paul had said from the beginning,
half-jokingly, that it was all for the museum," says
Jason Segel. "Once we got there it seemed like that
would have been fine with me, too. It was filled with
fans, and just being with the whole group of people
while we watched the episode, it felt like a real
family."

The family feeling continued through the
next night's wrap party -- "a big happy sad convention
of everyone who had ever worked on the show," as
Martin Starr recalled it. The American Legion Hall on
Highland Avenue was decorated as if for a 1980s prom,
with a professional prom photographer shooting couples
against a sky-blue backdrop, and a surprise
cap-and-gown graduation ceremony for Levine, Starr and
Rogen, all of whom were finishing real-world high
school. There were yearbooks to sign, and karaoke.
Judd sang his standard "Spinning Wheel," and Paul did
"Viva Las Vegas," and they slow-danced together while
Busy Philipps and Linda Cardellini, the latter in a
blond wig and her mother's ä
own prom dress, sang "Wind Beneath
My Wings."

A week later, Paul's mother died
suddenly.

And the night after that, after a week in
which the show received a total of one minute and 20
seconds of promotion, NBC ran Freaks and Geeks
for the last time, the episode "Chokin' and Tokin',"
in which Bill Haverchuck's peanut allergy puts him in
a coma and Lindsay gets paranoid on pot. Some of the
cast came by the office to watch the show. "It got to
that montage of her rolling a joint," recalls Jake
Kasdan, who was there working late cutting the last
episode, "and I had this grim flash that this is
not going to last, I could just see people all
over the country going, 'Huh?' And the scene where Sam
and Neal are sitting in the hospital hallway having
the conversation about what if Bill died, would he be
a ghost and hang out with us, and it ends with Sam
saying, 'He'd just be dead and gone, wouldn't he?'
Great moment, total Feig -- just this simple
presentation of the strongest ideas in the world, in
plain English exactly the way kids encounter those
ideas. As we were watching the show that night, I just
had this feeling, like, this show is too good and
weird to be on the air."

Notwithstanding a slight improvement in
the numbers, Freaks and Geeks was history by
noon the next day. Judd got the news from Shelley
McCrory, NBC's head of comedy development, then called
Paul at his father's accountant's office, where he was
settling his mother's affairs.

Then Garth Ancier called, Judd remembers,
"and I'm screaming and half crying and saying every
single thing I ever wanted to say to him in one phone
call. And he's a hard person to talk to, because he's
one of those people who does not confront you, so you
could say anything and he'll just go [sympathetically]
'Yeah, I know, yeah.' So it's no fun even to let it
all go. He sounds like he's made that call a thousand
times, he may have made that call three times that
day. For all I know he's on a speakerphone and there's
someone else in the room and they're giggling -- I
know it doesn't bother him. So it's just a
terrible moment, because you also know that he's a guy
that in his own way supported the show, and there's a
much larger political process that has to do with
affiliates, and GE, and you don't know if he has
anything to do with it. I doubt he woke up one morning
going, 'We must get rid of Freaks and Geeks.'
But he's the guy you have to talk to. And then you
feel terrible the next day that you lost your mind on
the phone. But then you do it again to [West Coast NBC
president] Scott Sassa the next day, 'cause you can't
stop yourself."

They had to reach Linda Cardellini, who
was flying to New York to appear on Late Show With
David Letterman. When they told her the show had
been canceled, she said, "They canceled David
Letterman?" The news didn't hit her until "I was
actually on, and David kind of touched my hand, and I
looked over and went, 'Woah, that's David
Letterman,' and then he said, 'I'm sorry to hear about
the show.' And hearing David Letterman say 'Sorry'
before I'd even told my family, I sat there and I was
like, 'Ohhh, it's ohhhhkay.' It made it real
at that point."

A death
in the family, the TV family. I phoned Shelley McCrory at NBC for an
official autopsy.

"This was a different kind of show for
us," she said, "and when we launched it on Saturday,
it was to get a sense of what it was going to be. And
we loved the episodes we saw, and that was what drove
the move to Monday, and we had a really spectacular
re-launch there.

"Unfortunately, it did not help us to
have [the Monday-night re-launching] clobbered by ABC
with Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and in the
weeks that followed it was difficult for us to get
traction. We did promote the show, and I think
the quality of promotion was excellent. Do I wish we
promoted it more? Of course. I don't
think there's a producer on this network or any other
that believes that they get enough promotion, but
there's a finite amount to go around, and you do the
best you can. Certainly there's never an intention to
not give a show enough promotion.

"The show does have a loyal audience.
Unfortunately the numbers it was doing were not
numbers we could live with. That was very painful to
accept. Everyone here really struggled; everyone here
loved the show. But we weren't seeing the growth that
we needed to see. And the thing that has made it
somewhat bearable for me was that when we made the
decision to pull the show, Scott Sassa was immediately
on the phone with Judd Apatow spitballing ideas to
find it a new home. I personally got on the phone to
Fox and the WB. I can't think of a time when we made
such proactive efforts to help a show find a new home.
Nobody here wants to see this show just go away. But
we have a very important business responsibility that
we have to always keep in mind. We have to stay
competitive; at the end of the day, that's the
business that we're in."

And that's it, of course: It's just
business. "For all my conspiracy theorizing," says
Jake Kasdan, "the truth of it is it's probably a very
simple sentence that's mostly numbers. Part of that is
that we weren't handled in the best possible way,
obviously, and part of it is that we were unrelenting
from day one about the reality we wanted to depict.
And that was partially in response to being turned off
by what's on television. And so how surprised can we
be, at the end of the day, when that audience that
likes those shows sort of sends a message? Certainly
ours is a show people liked, there's no question about
that anymore. But when you look at the shows the whole
country loves, they're nothing like this."

So: What have we learned? Well, Busy
Philipps, sounding as tough as the character she
played, learned that "Television is run by rich white
men who are told what to do by rich white men, who
want a formula to sell the most soap." Martin Starr
has come to believe that "If ever I do get on a good
show again, a really good show like Freaks and
Geeks, it's probably not going to make it again.
I've kind of lost hope in television management,
because there's a lot of crap out there; they shoved
it down the American people's throats, and now
everyone's kind of used to it, everyone kind of likes
it now, just because they've had to watch it for so
long."

What have Paul and Judd learned?
Hopefully . . . nothing. There is still some small,
small chance that Freaks and Geeks will go on,
but whatever happens, whatever they do together again,
one would prefer them to make the same mistakes next
time, to try for more than the medium asks of them, to
make the honest even if uncommercial choice. So they
skimp on the victories -- so what? Isn't there more to
life than winning? When was Lucy Ricardo ever
victorious? When was Ralph Kramden? It had a short
life and a bumpy one, but it was something to be proud
of, after all.

This week, the Museum of Television
& Radio is screening all episodes of Freaks
and Geeks, including marathons of the six unaired
episodes, on Saturday and Sunday, May 13 and 14,
from noon to 5 p.m. Paul Feig and Judd Apatow will
introduce. See Museum listings in Calendar, or call
(310)786-1000 for more info.